> There is the reality that a great many Americans - I'm one of them - simply
> do not have the income to support a  diet  of $13-buck steaks.  Thirteen
> dollars would feed me and my  daughter for about three days, and I
> grow/forage a lot of my food. Then there are the millions of Americans who
> are so poor and hungry they eat in soup kitchens or go without.
>

I'll join in here - there's several different threads we've had going
lately that seem to intersect at this point.

First off, it's not even remotely *necessary* to buy expensive steaks
in order to eat a Neanderthin or meat-centered diet of any sort.
Perusal of Ray's sample weeks menus shows a variety of meats, not all
expensive, and common sense dictates that we should vary our food
sources anyway, as we've been discussing at length during the
lifespan of this list.

Second, another major thread on this list is the tendency of hunter
populations to prefer organ meats, marrow and other fattier cuts over
the very lean meats that we have been trained to consider best in
modern america.  I buy whatever large fatty roast is on sale each
week, and cook it in my crockpot, or oven-slow roast it.  I rarely
pay more than $1.50 per pound for these cuts, and they feed us for
days.  It's taken some doing to learn to eat this much fat, but as my
system becomes accustomed to very few carbs (and ZERO cereal grains)
it's working better.  Something we learned a couple of years ago
feeding our dogs a raw meat diet, is that they would eat till they
were too stuffed to waddle if we gave them only lean meat. Solving
the problem was as simple as pouring a couple tablespoons of olive
oil on the hamburger.  Now we feed them chicken carcasses, turkey
wings, and raw beef bones, and they are sleek and beautiful.  We're
learning to do the same thing for ourselves (though we do cook our
meat <g>).

Also, my partner is an environmental professional (no, I do NOT mean
one of those who front for bad companies, I mean she had academic
and professional training and we are environmental activists) and
after all these years of digging into the issue, we are definitely
more aligned with "deep ecologists" and permaculturalists than with
Frances Moore Lappe and the "Diet for a Small Planet" theories.
Concern is good, blind adherence to a dubious theory is not.  We
have separated from quite a few environmentalists in recent years
over these issues.  I suppose it's all in what premises you use to
set up a definition of "sustainable". I welcome discussion, but not
slinging about of the term "political correctness".  If we co-evolved
on this planet, surely there's a way to arrange our eating habits so
that we are healthy and so is the planet that sustains us.

Remember, if you're getting an undesirable result from practising a
theory, maybe it's time to change the theory.  It's always good to
learn from experience.


Sla/n go fo/ill

Molly Ni/Da/na
[log in to unmask]
San Francisco, CA